Why is my website so slow?

Slow websites lose visitors before anything else gets a chance. Google's research found over half of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. They don't complain. They just leave.

The frustrating part is that your site probably feels fine to you. Your computer has visited it hundreds of times and has most of it saved. Your customers arrive fresh, often on a phone, often on mobile data. They get the real loading time. You never see it.

The usual suspects

• Huge images. The single most common cause. A photo straight off a phone camera can be twenty times bigger than it needs to be. The site loads it at full size and shrinks it for display, and the visitor pays for every byte.
• Too much going on. Sliders, animations, chat widgets, tracking scripts, video backgrounds. Each one seemed like a good idea. Together they're a queue of things the phone must download before the page settles.
• Old themes and page builders. Many small-business sites run on themes built years ago, stacked with features the site never uses. All of it still loads.
• Cheap or overloaded hosting. Sometimes the server itself is just slow to answer. Everything else waits behind that first response.
• No caching. Well set up sites hand repeat visitors saved copies of things instead of rebuilding everything each time. Badly set up ones rebuild the lot.

How slow is yours, actually?

Guessing doesn't help, and neither does loading your own site on your own machine. You need a measurement from a neutral test on a realistic connection.

That's what a SiteMOT does: it runs Google's own speed test against your live site on a simulated mobile connection and turns the result into a plain score, with the biggest causes named. It takes about a minute and it's free.

If the result stings, take heart. Speed problems are usually the most fixable ones on the list, and fixing them tends to pay for itself in visitors who stay.